Minette

by Melanie Clegg

  She can’t stay forever, of course. Mam started getting twitchy after just a week of her residence at the Palais Royal and the subtle hints about when she would be leaving began after a mere month. Mary just laughs them off though. ‘I’ll go when I’m good and ready,’ she says, popping another cake into her mouth and gaily waving to one of her new French friends from the window. ‘Did you know that there is a shade of silk called ‘La Princesse d’Orange’ now? I’m all the rage, it would seem.’

  In the end she stays for the summer and only starts to make noises about going home when the leaves begin to turn golden on the trees and Mam’s subtle hints have turned into outright interrogations.

  My cousin Philippe hosts a grand ball at the Louvre the night before Mary is due to leave and we all trot across the Rue Saint-Honoré in our finest clothes to join in the fun. ‘Don’t be foolish with your cousin this time,’ Mam hisses to me as we go up the marble staircase to the long gallery. ‘You are older now and ought to be a lot wiser.’

  Mary bought me a beautiful new dress for the occasion. ‘It’s my last present to you and I wanted it to be perfect,’ she says as she lifts the lid from its box and reveals it to me in all its shimmering sea green glory. I reverently touch it now as I enter the ball room, enjoying the slippery feel of the silk beneath my fingers and appreciating the way that the watery shade makes my pale skin glow like mother of pearl. As I make my way slowly across the gallery, enjoying the appreciative stares of the courtiers, I lift my voluminous skirts a little to proudly reveal pretty ribboned shoes of pale pink velvet.

  As she is a widow, my sister gracefully declines to dance and instead takes her usual place sitting alongside Mam and Tante Anne, who absolutely adores her and makes no secret of the fact that she wishes Mary could stay with us forever. They put their ringleted heads together and whisper excitedly as Louis silently and unsmilingly leads me out for the first dance.

  ‘You don’t mind dancing with me this evening then?’ he asks as we come up against each other briefly and touch our fingers together. His hands are cool and dry and I realise with horror that mine are still sticky with the juices of a peach that I ate in front of my looking glass while my mother’s maids painstakingly curled my hair into long ringlets.

  ‘I was younger then,’ I say with a smile as I surreptitiously and with much regret wipe my fingers on my skirts. ‘I’m twelve this year.’

  Louis smiles but doesn’t reply and the movement of the dance separates us for a few beats as we both turn in a circle and then come to face each other again.

  ‘Have you heard from Harry and Charles?’ he asks as our hands touch.

  I glance nervously at his face but see nothing there but genuine interest. ‘They write to me often,’ I say carefully.

  Louis nods. ‘I am glad of it. I do not think that my own brother would be half so obliging should he go away to war.’ He smiles revealing a flash of white teeth against his tanned complexion. ‘Philippe does not enjoy writing letters.’

  I laugh. ‘Nor does my brother Harry but he does it anyway for love of me.’ I think of Harry’s last letter from the Spanish armies: crumpled and stained with indifferent spelling and written in a curious mixture of French, English and Spanish that had taken me the best part of an afternoon to decipher.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Louis asks, looking a little affronted. I tell him and he grins. ‘I like Harry,’ he says. ‘I wish that he could have stayed in Paris and Charles as well. It is good to see James here though.’ He looks over at my brother, who has joined the group standing around the Mancini girls and is clearly trying his best to flirt with Marie, who silently watches him with an amused gleam in her fine dark eyes. ‘I think he would do well to direct his attention elsewhere,’ Louis observes wryly.

  An awkward silence falls until finally I can take no more and look directly at him. ‘I am sorry about what happened,’ I say. ‘With you and Charles, I mean.’

  He looks at me without smiling. ‘Kings have to make hard decisions sometimes,’ he says. He means Charles as well as himself of course: he had no choice but to send him away and Charles had no choice but to turn his back on him in his turn and make a treaty with Spain. ‘You must feel as though as you are trapped in the middle of it all,’ he says as if this had never before occurred to him which, of course, it hadn’t.

  I feel my cheeks go warm as I blush. ‘I care for all of you very much,’ I whisper so quietly that he has to lean forward to hear me.

  The dance comes to an end and he silently leads me back to our mothers, who beam upon us both with the greatest delight. ‘What a pretty pair you make,’ Tante Anne says, clapping her plump white hands together.

  Louis mutters something indistinct and practically thrusts me at my mother before hurrying away back to his friends and Olympe Mancini, who looks at me triumphantly over her bared shoulder. I sigh, pretend not to hear the young princeling who hurries over to offer me his hand for the next dance and sidle away to walk around the gallery. Mam, Mary and Tante Anne are deeply engrossed in a chat about the iniquities of one of Charles’ discarded mistresses and barely notice that I have gone.

  Very few people notice me as I walk through the crowd and those that do look at me curiously as they bow. As I skirt around Louis’ group I hear Olympe’s shrill Italian accent rising above the hubbub of conversation. ‘That poor child,’ she says, her voice bubbling with laughter. ‘She could barely take her eyes off you.’

  ‘I thought she was going to gobble you up,’ Philippe chimes in with a spiteful giggle.

  My heart stops when I hear Louis’ voice. ‘I wish she would gobble something up,’ he drawls as they all howl with laughter. ‘Did you see how thin she is? She looks like the bones of the Holy Innocents. If she’s not careful, my mother will have her put in a box and placed as a relic in the chapel.’ He turns and for a horrible moment our eyes meet before I pick up my skirts and push my way through the dancers to the antechamber at the far end of the gallery.

  I don’t cry until I’ve closed the door behind me and there’s no one to see but a liveried footman who looks at me in silent sympathy then discreetly turns his face away. I hear laughter and the Duchess of Richmond’s husky voice raised in concern on the other side of the door and in a panic push open a door to the side, which leads to Tante Anne’s splendid drawing room which has tall windows overlooking the Seine and vast mythological scenes of scantily clad gods and goddesses cavorting on the walls and ceiling. At first glance the room appears to be empty and so I thankfully close the door behind me and lean against it with my eyes closed.

  There’s a delicate cough and my eyes snap open to see Philippe’s bosom friend, Armand de Gramont leaning against the wall and eating an apple. Only a few candles have been lit in their ornate gilt sconces on the marble mantlepiece and in between the windows but there’s enough light for me to be able to tell that he’s smiling as he watches me.

  ‘I wanted to be alone,’ I say gracelessly, turning to leave and fumbling with the door handle, which frustratingly refuses to budge. My vision is cloudy with tears now and I can’t bear the thought of him seeing my distress.

  ‘Wait.’ I hear him coming up behind me. He doesn’t sound like he’s smiling any more.

  ‘Leave me alone.’ Reluctantly, I turn towards him and wipe my fingers over my face.

  ‘Your Highness,’ he takes a step towards me then stops. ‘Are you crying?’ I notice that his lips are full and that his eyelashes are long and dark and sweep the top of his high cheekbones.

  ‘Of course not,’ I say haughtily.

  He nods then gravely hands me a handkerchief, plucked from inside his black silk doublet. ‘Take this,’ he says.

  It smells of rosemary and lavender. I wipe away my tears and look at him. ‘Don’t tell Philippe about this,’ I whisper miserably. ‘I couldn’t bear it if he knew that they’d made me cry.’

  Armand looks at me for a long moment then nods. ‘My lips are sealed,’ he says before offering me his h
and. ‘Shall we shake on it? This is how things are done in England, is it not?’ he says with a smile.

  I hesitate for a moment then take his hand. He’s Philippe’s friend, not mine but for a brief instant, as his fingers curl around mine, I feel a little less alone and I am thankful to him for it.

  Chapter Seven

  Paris, July 1657

  A year passes and everything changes. Mam would sigh and say that nothing ever changes, that all things remain the same and there’s nothing new under the sun but I don’t believe her. I turned thirteen in the summer of 1657 and it seems to me that in the short time that I have been alive, everything that I’ve ever counted on has been knocked down around me.

  This should frighten me more than it does. ‘The Stuarts have always been an unlucky lot,’ Mary told me once as she did my hair, her small hands carefully pinning up my ringlets so that they hung in soft spirals on either side of my face. ‘Always have been, always will be.’ She smiled and stepped back to scrutinise her work. ‘It’s best not to fight these things.’

  Despite all of her complaints, Mam fell into a state of terrible gloom after Mary left Paris and James begrudgingly departed shortly afterwards for his new regiment in the Spanish armies. In typical flamboyant Mam style she decided that the lack of her elder children had left a gap that could only be filled by the purchase of a new country estate now that Chaillot had been almost entirely given up to the nuns. ‘We need somewhere of our own,’ she said to me as we went in our carriage on a swelteringly hot day to view the château of Colombes for the first time. It’s being sold by the Superintendent of Finance, Monsieur Fouquet’s younger brother and Tante Anne has promised to help us pay for it should we agree to buy as she thinks we need a summer residence outside Paris. ‘When you were very little we used to spend our summers at the château of Saint Germain, where I was born but then Louis needed it back when the court left Paris. We had some happy times there though.’ She gazes out of the window wistfully as her faithful lady in waiting, the Duchess of Richmond leans forward to gently pat her hand. ‘Charles, James, Harry, you and me, all together.’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ I say. I wish that I did though. I’m greedy for memories and anecdotes about my family. I could listen for hours to Mam reminiscing about Our Sainted Father and the life they all shared in England before it went wrong. Of course, as time passes, she tends to only remember the good times and gives a highly romanticised version of everything but I’m willing to accept any scrap, however minute, however rose tinted and distorted by time and careful editing, that she throws me.

  We fall in love with Colombes immediately. It’s a pretty little sandstone château with cheerful blue painted wooden shutters hiding the tall windows that look down upon the semi circular courtyard. I leap out of our carriage almost as soon as it pulls up and sprint into the house past the huge terracotta pots of lavender and roses that have been placed on either side of the front door. I find myself in a cool, pale lemon painted entrance hall with shining black and white tiles on the floor and a wide marble staircase that sweeps up to the first floor.

  Mam bustles in behind me with the Duchess, complaining about the size of the hall and already planning renovations to the front of the house, which she says is insufficiently grand. It requires columns and a classical peristyle apparently. I leave them behind and run through the series of grand salons that line the back of the house, all of which have French windows leading directly out to the lovely gardens beyond. The château is completely empty and I enjoy the way that my high heels tap on the polished wooden parquet floor and the sunshine streams through the un-curtained windows.

  Upstairs there are several bedrooms and I decide that the second biggest, a pretty chamber that has shell pink panelled walls and a stone balcony overlooking the gardens, will be mine. I can hear Mam barking instructions at Monsieur Fouquet’s notary who is showing her around and hug myself with joy, certain that this is to be our new home.

  We move in straight away, bringing with us cartloads of furniture and paintings donated by Tante Anne from the stores at the Louvre. And so it is that I sleep at night in a canopied bed that belonged to Mam when she was a girl, watched over by a small portrait of my ancestress, Mary of Scotland, painted shortly after she became Queen of France in virginal white with huge luminous pearls pinned in her red hair. Mam says that the portrait gives her the shivers but I like to have Mary’s pretty hazel eyes resting on me as I settle down to sleep. I know that she would never do me harm.

  One of the best things about Colombes is the small lake that lies hidden behind the trees at the edge of the park. When the weather is warm, I walk down there with my maids and shed my clothes at the bank before sliding with a happy sigh into the cool green water.

  Harry taught me how to swim. ‘Just in case you have to become a pirate like cousin Rupert,’ he said with a wink. ‘Also, all English girls can swim. That’s what comes of living on an island.’ Mam thinks it a most peculiar pastime and worries about diseases or insect bites but I think it is glorious. I love to float on my back and gaze up at the sunlight shimmering through the branches of the trees. I close my eyes and enjoy the blooming of pink and orange light that filters through my eyelids. I’m free as a bird as I float through the water without the heavy layers of clothes that usually encumber me.

  Mam usually stays away when I’m swimming, but just once she ventures down to the lake, pushing the trees away impatiently as she goes and tutting as she swipes away an intrepid dragonfly. ‘Minette, your hair looks like rats tails,’ she scolds as I flip myself over and swim towards her. ‘I’m so glad that your cousins can’t see you now.’ She’s flushed with excitement about something and my heart skips a beat as I spot a letter in her hand. Is Charles coming back to us? Has Louis asked for my hand in marriage? Has Cromwell given in and asked us all to come home to England?

  No, alas. ‘Guess what has happened,’ she says as my maids cover me up with a large towel so that I can dry myself. I shake my hair out and tie it up with a pink velvet ribbon. I don’t want to guess because that would mean giving away all of my own secret hopes so instead I stay silent. ‘Aren’t you going to guess?’ Mam asks with a pout. She hates it when I refuse to play her games. I shake my head, this time mischievously. ‘Anne-Marie is back at court again.’

  My mouth drops open. ‘Oh no,’ I say before I can stop myself. I can’t help it though: life has been so much better since my cousin was made to leave Paris. ‘Why?’

  Mam sighs but doesn’t rebuke me. ‘I’m as disappointed as you,’ she says. ‘Your Tante Anne says in her letter that Anne-Marie arrived quite unexpectedly one day while the court was in residence at Sedan. It was all very awkward at first, as you can imagine but what can they do but forgive and forget?’

  ‘I wouldn’t forget,’ I mutter, forgetting my childish admiration of Anne-Marie’s exploits at the Bastille. ‘What does Louis say about it all?’

  ‘Oh, Louis,’ Mam says airily. ‘Well, like his father my poor dear brother, he really hates to be put on the spot but she’s his cousin and he’s known her all his life so what could he do but put his qualms aside and kiss and make up?’

  I can’t help smirking. ‘He won’t be happy about that,’ I say with relish. Serve him right. I can picture the scene clearly - Louis dark browed and furious with resentment as he leans in to peck at Anne-Marie’s blushing cheek. She’ll be ecstatic of course. I bet she’s already picking out her bridal clothes.

  ‘I don’t think there’s any chance that he’ll agree to marry her now,’ Mam says, correctly interpreting my scowl. ‘Besides, she’s far too old for him. She turned thirty last month and Louis is but eighteen. He’ll be looking for a much younger bride.’ She looks at me speculatively, her gaze sweeping up from my muddy bare feet past the towel that I am clutching to my thin frame and then up past my sun warmed cheeks to the tousled curls that I have tied anyhow on top of my head. ‘Of course,’ she says, ‘it’s possible to be too young.’


  I stick my tongue out at her. ‘Why now?’ I ask, signalling to the maids that I am dry enough to be dressed again in my chemise. Two of them hold the towel out as a barrier between myself and my mother, while the others drop the chemise over my head then tie a wide blue silk sash around my waist. ‘I thought she was happy in the countryside.’ It’s not true. Who could be happy when they are cut off from all that they have ever known? Especially someone like my cousin Anne-Marie who longs for power and influence. I’m amazed that she didn’t go half mad from frustration. Perhaps she did? Suddenly, I begin to look forward to seeing her again.

  ‘Well, it was always bound to happen sooner or later,’ Mam says reasonably. ‘Of course, Anne assures me that our niece’s return will have no effect on your precedence at court. As the daughter of a king, you will still be the highest ranking unmarried princess.’

  I shrug. ‘Anne-Marie won’t like that,’ I say. I couldn’t care less what order we go into dinner or who dances before whom, but I know that it matters a great deal to Mam and Tante Anne.

  There’s a huge party at the Louvre to celebrate Anne-Marie’s glorious return to court. I don’t want to go but Mam insists and in the end I stomp across the Rue Saint-Honoré with very bad grace, dressed in my favourite gown of pale pink silk, with a garland of roses from Colombes on my head and Mary’s pearls fastened for luck around my neck. The entire court is crammed into the long gallery to see Anne-Marie officially received back at court again and as we go up the stairs, I hear some of the courtiers making bets about the likelihood of a royal wedding in the near future.